Blogger Discovers That You’re Never More Than 170 Miles Away From A Starbucks

Did you think you could escape the mermaid?? Think again, person who likes local coffeehouses and rails agains the creep of corporatism in American society! Over at If We Assume, blogger James Davenport maps out the locations of Starbucks coffee stores across the country and discovers that you’re never too far away from a pumpkin spice latte — that is, if you’re cool with driving 170 miles.

However, that’s only the case for less than 10% of the American populace. Davenport also discovers:

There are ~311 million people living in the USA, with 82% living in urbanized areas. One might define urbanization in the modern era as the distance to the nearest Starbucks. An “urban” environment would therefore be anyplace within a 20 mile radius. Yes, more than 80% of the USA (that’s 250,000,000 people) live within 20 miles of a Starbucks.